The Confession Club

Set in the small town of Mason, Missouri, the novel centers on the Confession Club, a weekly gathering of women that becomes a space for honesty and vulnerability, while also tracing the love story between a baking instructor and a homeless veteran whose paths converge unexpectedly.

The story opens with Joanie Benson, a sixty-five-year-old retired librarian, preparing to host the Confession Club. The group began as a supper club formed by women who had taken baking classes together, but it evolved into a weekly ritual: one member confesses something she has done wrong or is ashamed of, and the others respond with the words "Go in peace." A peach-colored scarf is worn home by whoever is forgiven. Members include Toots Monroe, the town council president; Gretchen Buckwalter, a boutique owner; Rosemary Dolman, a glamorous woman approaching sixty; Dodie Hicks, a blunt woman north of seventy; and Karen Lungren, a minister's wife.

Joanie enlists Iris Winters, a baking instructor who moved to Mason from Boston, to help make an ambitious Black Cake for the meeting. When Iris returns home with ingredients, she finds Maddy Harris upstairs. Maddy, a young woman in her twenties, once lived in this house as a pregnant teenager taken in by Arthur Truluv and Lucille Howard, an elderly couple who became her surrogate family. Arthur willed the house to Maddy, who now rents it to Iris. Maddy has arrived with her seven-year-old daughter, Nola, and reveals that she and her husband, Matthew, are "taking some time" apart.

Meanwhile, John Loney, a sixty-six-year-old homeless Vietnam veteran, has left his group of friends on the streets of Chicago and hitchhiked to Mason, where he settles into an abandoned farmhouse hidden behind overgrown lilac bushes. He plants a vegetable garden, cleans the house, and finds peace in the rural landscape, though he is haunted by memories of his ex-wife, Laura, and by grief that overtakes him without warning. His background emerges in fragments: a violent father, service in Vietnam that left him with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and a marriage that his condition destroyed.

When Iris and Maddy deliver the cake to the club meeting, they ask to join and are admitted on a trial basis. Nola befriends Link, the twelve-year-old son of neighbors Abby and Jason Summers, who own the local bookshop. Iris drives to the farmhouse to cut lilacs and meets John for the first time. Despite her initial wariness, she is drawn to his kindness and humor. During a thunderstorm, he invites her inside, where she observes his sparse but tidy quarters. He plays a guitar he found at the dump, recites the Gettysburg Address from memory, and asks for her phone number. She impulsively invites him to dinner.

At Confession Club meetings, members open up in turn. Joanie confesses how she caught her husband cheating and, more revealingly, describes the liberation she felt when she began marking up a beloved book with coffee stains and underlining after a lifetime of rigidity. Maddy reveals she has been lying to Matthew about why she came to Mason and about her inability to love openly, tracing her difficulties to her father, who blamed her for her mother's death in a car accident shortly after Maddy was born. Karen shares that she also struggled with self-loathing and advises Maddy to begin with self-love. In later meetings, Gretchen confesses she wants to cut contact with her ungrateful adult sons, and Rosemary describes the anguish of aging and her frustration over a sexless marriage.

John misses his Saturday dinner with Iris, consumed by a PTSD flashback, but later arrives at her house in the rain to apologize. Their relationship deepens as they plant a garden together at the farm. John tells Iris about the night his wife left: He wet the bed, crawled onto the roof with a rifle, and shot at the sky until police arrested him. After his release, he chose homelessness over the unbearable pressure of domestic life. They make love for the first time, and John tells Iris he thinks he is in love with her, calling it "bad news." She reciprocates. Yet tension surfaces when John lashes out after Iris presses him to discuss Vietnam, and he shuts down when she jokes about "adding to the family," revealing his fear of domestic attachment.

Maddy encounters Anderson, Nola's biological father, on the street. He is now married and moving to Florida. Maddy feels a surprising lightness but grows anxious when she calls Matthew and he is curt and distracted. Meanwhile, Maddy and Iris worry that Link's obsessive scientific experiments signal something wrong with his mother, Abby, who previously had leukemia. The mystery resolves when Nola reveals that Abby is pregnant, not ill, and that Link's experiments were related to predicting the baby's sex.

At Confession Club, Iris reveals she is in love with a homeless man, and Toots tells her John is about to be evicted from the farmhouse unless he buys it. Iris secretly submits an offer on the property, planning to rent it to John affordably and eventually live there together. John, however, discovers Laura's Facebook profile through Ollie Futters, an independent woman near ninety for whom he does handyman work. Laura is living in Cleveland, and the discovery reignites John's need to see her and apologize. When Iris reads his journal at the farm, she discovers his plan to leave the next day. A poem he copied, Ben Jonson's "Inviting a Friend to Supper," serves as his goodbye. When John returns, Iris makes it easy for him, telling him he should go.

Nola reveals that Matthew is on his way to Mason, having agreed to come when she simply asked him on Link's phone. Matthew tells Maddy he only moved to New York for her photography career and always loved Mason. At the cemetery where they were married, near Arthur's grave, Matthew promises never to leave, saying he has enough love, trust, and faith for both of them. Maddy, who has spent her life expecting bad news, finally says she is in.

John hitchhikes to Cleveland and watches Laura emerge from her house with a man who is clearly her partner. She looks happy. Realizing he cannot disrupt her life, John feels free of his decades-long penance and heads west. In Las Vegas, a casino worker named Trudy takes him in for the night and tells him he is alive inside. On the highway the next morning, John witnesses someone dump a starving dog from a car. Recalling his mother's words that taking risks is just unmasking hope, he crosses the road, rescues the dog, and names her Karma. A trucker picks him up heading away from California, and John accepts the direction.

Iris closes on the farmhouse, renovates it, and fills the property with animals and gardens. She writes a final email to her ex-husband Ed, who has reached out about reconnecting, gently declining and telling him she has changed since moving to Mason. At one of the final Confession Club meetings, Dodie brings up assisted suicide, asking the group to help her die on her own terms should a serious illness arise. The women agree. Dodie reflects that confessing imperfections is what brings people closer together, and Toots adds that forgiveness is the most powerful force in the world.

One afternoon, standing on her porch, Iris sees a lone figure walking toward her from the road with a black dog at his side. She recognizes John's silver hair, his lean walk, the set of his shoulders. She has always wanted a reason to run to the man she loves, but this time she stands perfectly still and waits.